{"id":24184,"date":"2020-03-30T20:41:30","date_gmt":"2020-03-30T20:41:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/newsroom247.com.ng\/?p=24184"},"modified":"2020-03-30T20:41:30","modified_gmt":"2020-03-30T20:41:30","slug":"what-is-the-coronavirus-pain-telling-us-by-bolutiwi-aiyesimoju","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/newsroom247.com.ng\/?p=24184","title":{"rendered":"&#8220;What is the Coronavirus Pain Telling us?&#8221; by Bolutiwi Aiyesimoju"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/alternativeadvert.com\/show.php?z=30&amp;pl=19271&amp;ad_type=81&amp;rl=1800\" width=\"336\" height=\"280\" frameborder=\"0\" marginwidth=\"0\" marginheight=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<div dir=\"auto\">It&#8217;s been a while. The whole world is united for once! The pandemic we&#8217;re experiencing has certainly put enormous stress on all economies, systems, ways of life, personal well being and we collectively groan under the &#8220;inconvenience&#8221; of social distancing and self-isolation.<\/div>\n<div dir=\"auto\"><\/div>\n<div dir=\"auto\">There is no doubt that the situation is serious. There is also no doubt that the loss of lives is painful and we must show compassion for those loved ones left behind. What is also true is that in the chaos of this unprecedented experience where the enemy cannot be targetted and bombed, shot, denied a visa or deterred by a wall, we must look within for answers.<\/div>\n<div dir=\"auto\"><\/div>\n<div dir=\"auto\">We must ask ourselves, why our lungs must be attacked for the earth to breathe better (did you know that since the pandemic there has been much less environmental pollution due to the factories closing or slowing down, planes being grounded, less traffic in the streets&#8230;).<\/div>\n<div dir=\"auto\"><\/div>\n<div dir=\"auto\">We must also ask ourselves why it takes disease that attacks the rich and the poor indiscriminately, a disease that has no regard for nationality, colour, creed&#8230; for us to take note. Did you know that 9.1 million people die of starvation each year. Each year, in a world where tons of food is wasted on a daily basis. Why are we not talking about this? Are the lives of those who die of starvation less noteworthy than those who die of the coronavirus. You see the level of internal social distancing that we must have to look away in a world where 9.1 million people die each year from a preventable cause is mind-boggling. Now we must practice social distancing physically and it hurts. We have, however, have been practicing it for years mentally and emotionally as we at some level say to ourselves those people who die of starvation are not like me, are not my equal and thus do not feel the natural human compassion that one would if one felt empathy.<\/div>\n<div dir=\"auto\"><\/div>\n<div dir=\"auto\">This whole experience is a wake-up call. It&#8217;s a time to reflect, its a time to question, it&#8217;s a time to show up as human being with courage and compassion playing your part. Thousands of people have answered the call of their governments as they volunteer all over the world to serve. I hear John Kennedy&#8217;s famous words: Ask not what your country can do for you &#8211; ask what you can do for your country.\u00a0 Yes! What can each of us do as individuals? It could be simply self-isolating so we don&#8217;t infect others, It could be volunteering to support the National Health systems, it could be creating funny videos that boost morale, it could be donating money or equipment, it could be checking up on people who are even more isolated than they would be normally, it could be inventing something that would be of benefit to your community or the world.<\/div>\n<div dir=\"auto\"><\/div>\n<div dir=\"auto\">Our politicians are human and the pressure we&#8217;re experiencing now may show up the fragilities inherent in our systems even more. The issues are however not caused by the pandemic but accelerated.<\/div>\n<div dir=\"auto\"><\/div>\n<div dir=\"auto\">So we may want to think twice before wishing to go back to our old lives. The interesting thing about pain is that often we want the pain to stop and to go back to normal. What we don&#8217;t often do is stop and ask. &#8220;What is the pain telling me?&#8221; What has lead to this pain? What is the recognition that I can gain as an individual or we can gain collectively so that the pain serves its purpose and we move into a new, more conscious life instead of back to the old&#8230;<\/div>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/alternativeadvert.com\/show.php?z=30&amp;pl=19271&amp;ad_type=81&amp;rl=1800\" width=\"336\" height=\"280\" frameborder=\"0\" marginwidth=\"0\" marginheight=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s been a while. The whole world is united for once! The pandemic we&#8217;re experiencing has certainly put enormous stress on all economies, systems, ways of life, personal well being and we collectively groan under the &#8220;inconvenience&#8221; of social distancing and self-isolation. There is no doubt that the situation is serious. There is also no [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":23921,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"spay_email":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false},"categories":[8],"tags":[5737],"class_list":["post-24184","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-society","tag-coronavirus"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"http:\/\/newsroom247.com.ng\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/02\/sowing.jpg","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4oswh-6i4","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/newsroom247.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24184","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/newsroom247.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/newsroom247.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/newsroom247.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/newsroom247.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=24184"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/newsroom247.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24184\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24185,"href":"http:\/\/newsroom247.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24184\/revisions\/24185"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/newsroom247.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/23921"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/newsroom247.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=24184"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/newsroom247.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=24184"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/newsroom247.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=24184"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}